Voice activity detection (VAD) has come a long way since its origin, but high noise environments remain a significant challenge.
To improve performance in very noisy conditions, previous studies have utilized multiple microphones to successfully develop multi-channel VADs (MVADs) that base the VAD decision on spatial cues, e.g. interchannel time, level and phase difference (ITD, ILD and IPD respectively) [1]} [2]} [3]}.
However, MVADs are relatively new compared to single-channel VAD (SVAD) algorithms that have been developed very thoroughly [4]}.
Therefore, it might be advantageous to improve the existing SVAD by applying pre-processing techniques to the algorithms.
To the best of the authors' knowledge, prior studies have not investigated the use of pre-processing methods based on spatial cues to improve multiple existing SVAD algorithms.
